By Paula Day

Glenmary priest Father Lou McNeil, who will celebrate 25 years as a member of the Glenmary Home Missioners on Aug. 15, remembers a “hootenanny summer” spent in Statesboro, Ga. over two decades ago.

He and five other seminarians and six young women had volunteered to work in the area for six weeks, and every evening there was singing and dancing.

“I thought if I joined Glenmary my whole life would be like that,” he recalled. However, the 50-year-old priest from Detroit’s suburb of St. Clair Shores has found his ministry as a Glemarian more substantive.

Since 1986 he has been director of Glenmary’s Research Center located on Piedmont Avenue in Atlanta’s Midtown area. In the six years prior to that he completed his doctoral dissertation and taught at Washington Theological Union in Washington, D.C. Before that he was involved in pastoral ministry in Texas, Mississippi, Tennessee and, for two years, in Cleveland and Blairsville, Georgia. Father McNeil holds a master’s degree and doctorate in theology from St. Michael’s College in Toronto.

The Glenmary Home Missioners are the only U.S. missionaries established for the sole purpose of carrying out pastoral ministry in the small towns and rural districts of the United States. The priests and brothers work throughout the Appalachia and the rural South and Southwest. Twenty percent of the people living in the areas where they minister live in poverty and less than one percent are Catholic.

Suburban-born Lou McNeil did not come uninitiated to rural life. His parents had grown up in a rural area of east Canada. As a youngster, he spent summers helping an uncle with the haying on his North Carolina farm. While a theology student, he began to think about missionary work when he was asked to consider working toward a master’s degree in education. He realized if he continued to prepare for ordination as a priest for the archdiocese of Detroit he would probably “end up in teaching or as a counselor and be assigned to suburbia.”

“This began to push me toward Maryknoll (Catholic Foreign Mission Society of America) or Glenmary,” he recalled.

Father McNeil describes himself as “an ideologue” but one suspects that he is only maintaining that idealism for which his generation of college-age students was so well-known. Responding to questions about Glenmary’s tradition of ecumenical and community involvement, he explained that to work for the moral and social uplift of a community, to become involved in such projects as Meals on Wheels and Habitat for Humanity, is to provide a larger vision of the Gospel message.

“Anything the Church does in these areas is evangelization,” he observed.

He further explained what he termed the two major charisms. One, which diocesan priests share, is to nurture the faith of those who are already Catholic. The other the missionary charism, is given to those called to minister in new environment and a different culture. Both charisms need lay people and clergy, he pointed out, if they are to flourish.

For Father McNeil personally, immersing himself in the needs, both material and spiritual, of the poor, gives him the stuff of which homilies are made, “gives me something to bring to the altar.”

“Spirituality is not divorced from motivation,” he commented. “Reading theology, preparing homilies, reading Scripture - all this motivates, gives vision and passion. All the ups and downs of life feed the spirit, too.”

“I can’t compartmentalize liturgy and the world. I have to bring to the Table what is happening in the world. I need to be looking for and asking for the meaning of God in my everyday life. There’s no searching for God if I’m just sitting at a desk.”

“I need to go to the Lord in thanksgiving,” he added. “Go to the altar thankful for my family, for my relationships, for the events in my life. I also need to be motivated to leave the Table and make something happen. Life is not compartmentalized.” Father McNeil’s work as director of the Glenmary Research Center is “mostly administrative,” which he translated as “doing whatever needs to be done and we don’t have the money to hire people to do.” Most recently that has meant painting offices in the Center, a job he describes as “therapy” because its physicality is a marked change from his usual mental tasks.

During the past year these tasks have included writing journal articles on evangelization and mission theology, giving workshops on ministry in the South and teaching a course of the foundations of Catholic theology through the Catholic Center at Emory University.

The Research Center itself is involved in various aspects of sociology and religion. Its studies benefits all denominations concerned with the issues of social justice and the role of religion in society, according to Lee DeSandre, one of the Center’s five staff members. For example, in connection with the 1990 U.S. census, the Center will gather material for and publish “Churches and Church Membership,” containing data relating to religion and the U.S. population.

Father McNeil’s summer plans for celebrating his silver jubilee as a Glenmary include a community celebration in Richmond, Ky.; spending a week in Detroit to “get a sense of the city again, and my roots, and to see my friends there;” and spending two weeks with his remaining blood relatives, aunts, uncles and cousins who live in Nova Scotia.